International

At the Drouot auction centre in June around 3000 items of Asian art went under the hammer in a series of 20 auctions that were either dedicated sales or featured substantial Asian sections.

A claim by former auctioneer turned art-advisor Simon de Pury that he is owed $10m for facilitating the sale of a work by Paul Gauguin was heard before the High Court in London last week.

The island of St Helena featured in a folding plate from a 1598, first English edition of Jan Huygen van Linschoten’s famous Itinerario – published as Discours of Voyages into ye Easte & West Indies – offered by Ketterer Kunst (20% buyer’s premium) on May 22.

Fleur Callegari has joined the team of Les Enluminures as art director. She will be based in the Paris gallery of this firm which specialises in medieval and Renaissance manuscripts, miniatures and jewellery (the gallery has other bases in Chicago and New York).

Like many of the world’s major art markets these days, Paris concentrates activity in the Asian art field into series at specific times of the year in an attempt to attract those all-important buyers from Mainland China.

Preserved in a fine contemporary binding of crimson morocco gilt that seems likely to have been specially commissioned by the artist from Pasqual Carsi y Vidal, a leading Madrid binder, a rare presentation set of Goya’s Los Caprichos prints sold for $500,000 (£393,700) at Christie’s New York (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on June 15.

TEFAF is to trial its own online selling platform at the fair organisation’s autumn New York event, with a view to building a permanent e-commerce presence.

For previous generations of artist jewellers, from René Lalique to Andrew Grima, retail sales and private commissions were everything. Typically it was only much later in the collecting lifecycle, after a period of posthumous reassessment and rediscovery, that their work appeared at auction with any great regularity.

Ahead of the autumn sale of a star lot, Phillips' watch expert Aurel Bacs tells ATG why the time is right for the firm to expand its US watch business

The “oldest mathematical textbook still in common use today”, according to Printing and the Mind of man, is that written around 300BC by the Greek mathematician, Euclid of Alexandria.

One of the odder lots I have stumbled across in the many June book sales is a worn and soiled 12pp autograph catalogue, or calendar of “35 nude male races held on Kersal Moor [near Manchester] between 1777 and 1811”.

The collection of Tiffany jewels offered by Christie’s New York (25/20/12% buyer’s premium) on June 20 was the finest at auction in recent memory.

Art books in a Ketterer Kunst (20% buyer’s premium) sale of May 22 included one of 15 deluxe copies of a 1950 edition of Harry Roskolenko’s Paris Poems, containing an original watercolour by Zau Wou-Ki and an extra suite of his lithographed illustrations. It sold at €42,000 (£36,240).

Promoted in a catalogue issued by Fonsie Mealy (20/25% buyer’s premium) for its May 20 sale as something “for the collector who has (almost) everything”, an autograph section from James Joyce’s Finnegan’s Wake was sold at €27,000 (£23,480).

Last offered at auction at Parke-Bernet in New York in 1945, as part of the famed Bronson Winthrop collection, a drawing made by John Tenniel for Alice through the Looking-Glass made $16,000 (£12,600) at Sotheby’s New York (25/20/12.5% buyer’s premium) on June 13 – though the saleroom had hoped it might make twice that sum.

It is high season for sales in Paris and the Drouot auction centre, home to 75 firms, is busy with its usual roster across all disciplines.

This rather unsettling woodcut illustration shown above, an almost surreal depiction of an amputation, is taken from from a 1515, Grüninger of Strasbourg edition of Hieronymous Brunschwig’s Das buch der wund Artzeny. Handwirkung der Cirurgia.

Original D-Day invasion flags may be fragile and rare but a spate of them has appeared on the market recently in the US.